1 in 5 Financial Institutions Exploring Crypto Trading, Survey Finds
The firm recently surveyed more than 400 clients on its data and trading platforms, including Eikon, REDI, FXall and Elektron. About 20 percent of these clients were “really interested and actively exploring” launching cryptocurrency trading operations in 2018, the firm’s director of new content initiatives Sam Chadwick told CoinDesk.
According to a press statement, 70 percent of the firms looking into trading plan to begin in three to six months, while another 22 percent aim to start in six to 12 months.
“This is a major change from a year ago,” Neill Penney, Thomson Reuters’ co-head of trading, said in the statement.
Chadwick emphasized the shift in attitudes, telling CoinDesk that a year ago, “as we were engaging customers, none of them had any particular interest in cryptocurrencies.” Clients were instead interested in “the blockchain side of things, smart contracts.”
Interest has since notably shifted towards cryptocurrencies. For example, within Eikon’s foreign exchange category, traffic to the landing page for cryptocurrencies comes second only to the euro, Chadwick said. Thomson Reuters has also supplemented its bitcoin price feed with data for ether, litecoin, bitcoin cash and Ripple’s XRP, as well as bitcoin futures prices and indices from CryptoCompare.
Some survey respondents said, “we’ll trade anything,” he continued. However, in general, interest concentrated around those coins with larger market valuations. A small number further expressed interest in trading ICO tokens, but “privacy coins” such as zcash and monero had few takers. And a few said they were amenable to trading cryptocurrencies, but only through ETFs or similar instruments.
Interesting statement about the privacy coins. Thought they’d be more popular.
Also… does this mean we’ll see more money flow through the crypto space in the coming months?